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Today I lead a trip to the Inverdoorn Game Reserve two and one-half hours west of the city.  It turns out to be a good decision to take on this trip because it affords the opportunity to see many species of wildlife in the enormous 10,000-hectares (approximately 22,000 acres) reserve of a desert biome completely different from other areas nearer to Cape Town.  The road we take stretches 1,000 kilometers on to Johannesburg in the northwest and goes through the longest tunnel in Africa.  Mountain ranges on all sides are spectacular, most of them consisting of very hard sandstone resistant to erosion.

In the Tulbagh valley between Cape Town and our destination, rich farmland around the Touwsriver provides irrigation for abundant grape harvests for fresh eating and wine and orchards with deciduous fruits in Ceres.  But past the river valley the ecology changes to harsh and dry desert

A French family privately purchased the reserve land and now operates a safari lodge on its extensive grounds in order to fund conservation efforts, provide local employment for native people in a rural area, and rehabilitate lions and cheetahs.  Because people in rural areas are far more interested in moving to urban areas—and government authorities in the latter must fund housing and city services for those new residents—there is now far less money for conservation agencies in rural areas.  Thus, many parks and reserves have had to become ever more enterprising in order to survive.  Inverdoorn is an impressive project to welcome paying travelers and protect wildlife while conserving the environment.

[The giraffe above is pleasantly pregnant.  The springbok at left is a tough one to catch before they bound away.]

For those of us on this day trip, it is a chance to do a mini-safari without the time and cost of the three-day and four-day safaris that many of our fellow shipmates have undertaken to much more remote locations.  The reserve is in the immense Karoo desert and the vistas are stunning.  We bounce around in modified land rovers peering closely in a landscape that does a pretty good job of providing camouflage for most of the animals we seek.  We do a good job—finding all of them except for the rhinoceros.  Although we find his tracks and his scat, he still succeeds in eluding us.

All afternoon we drive and then stop to take pictures when we sight them:  giraffe, zebra, waterbuck, oryx, springbok, hippopotamus (only the nose and top of his head peeks out of the water), korhaan, kudu, impala, eland, lion, ostrich and cheetah.  We spot birds, too:  white necked raven, cattle egret and Cape spurfowl.

Coming back into Cape Town we run into both returning Easter holiday and Jazz Festival traffic and there are three knotty jams, one of them in that very, very long tunnel through the mountains that we previously traveled quickly through on the way out of town.  By the time we get back to the ship the winds near the harbor are so strong that we can barely walk from the bus and the temperature is dropping.  We cannot complain.  We have had fantastic weather our entire stay.

Cape Town is not what any of us expects.  Unlike so many other cities in what we think of as the Third World, much of its urban infrastructure is relatively modern—for all the fact that it is ringed by townships that range from secluded estates for the super rich to modest homes in older communities to corrugated metal-roofed shacks in the slums.  The ship docks in a highly developed waterfront area that is a smart and vibrant mix of renovated historic buildings and facilities for tourists alongside a hugely busy commercial port.  We see evidence of sophisticated efforts at urban sustainability that far surpass what we do in most cities in the United States—everything from point-of-use solar panels and windmills to paying-for-plastic bags and containers.

The city itself is crammed in front of the northern aspect of the famous Table Mountain, which looms over everything.  You cannot go anywhere in Cape Town without seeing Table Mountain.  But what surprises us even more is how much history has been preserved here and how vital the downtown is, dating back in many parts to the 17^th and 18^th centuries, and beautifully restored.  For almost 200 years until slavery’s abolishment in 1834, Cape Town was the site of auctions of slaves and indentured laborers from both Africa and Asia resulting in the nonwhite populations now designated as black and coloured.  There are many memorials and museums on the legacy of slavery.

A friend, Jill, the ship’s nurse practitioner on duty in Cape Town (a second nurse practitioner is on one of the safaris along with Warner and Nancy), has a terrible night on call with medical emergencies.  But she still wants to get off the ship and go out for the day. So, after lots of caffeine from the excellent coffee in a wharf restaurant, we head out to walk the 45 minutes to downtown.  We walk through the city all day long and are amazed to find, among many other sights, a long public promenade and an enormous, beautiful public garden—The Company Garden—established by the Dutch East Indian Company in the 1600s. A huge stage is going up in the Greenmarket Square, not far from the historic Dutch Reformed and Methodist churches and just a couple blocks away from the garden and St. George’s Cathedral, a liberal Anglican congregation—Desmond Tutu’s home church—whose leaders had the courage to stand up to the apartheid government.

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Cape Town’s people are not what any of us expects, either.  Instead of resentment towards white, well-off Americans, we’re astonished by how welcoming, helpful and friendly everyone we meet seems to be.  People of every nationality, ethnicity and race go out of their way to strike up a conversation with us and ask us where we’re from.  Instead, people actually offer to explain when they see we’re puzzled by something.  (We are particularly mystified by spent gunshot shells on the streets with people’s names on them below large signs urging people to give up their guns and ammunition.  Both turn out to be a clever way to make it worthwhile for people to give those up.)

Also striking is the number of hard working people from Zimbabwe.  Mandela is the one who insisted that South Africa should take in refugees from Zimbabwe, but there has recently been some violence in objection to people from that hard-pressed country taking jobs and scarce housing away from South Africans.  They all send remittances home from South Africa to their families.  (I learn a great deal about Zimbabwe—formerly Rhodesia—because I become smitten with Peter Godwin’s books, Mukiwa and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun about how the country went from one of the most prosperous in Africa to a complete basket case under the dictatorship of Mugabe, a man who at one time was seen to be the newly independent nation’s savior.)

Cape Town is the first place since Japan where we encounter no surly hawkers.  (On the other hand, given our experience with desperate sellers of goods and souvenirs, we continually wonder whether people are earning enough from what they sell.  Possibly they are.  Prices in South Africa are much more nearly like prices in the US and Europe.  Many of us also wind up buying much more in South Africa, even at those higher prices, because many of the sellers are members of cooperatives marketing directly to buyers.)

It takes Cape Town’s people to remind us how much our experience there must be like what many people who come to American cities here must encounter.  That is, the level of crime in urban South Africa is pretty much like most American cities.  Most visitors to American cities are amply forewarned about crime and yet they also frequently remark upon how friendly the American people are.  There is less violent crime in South Africa than there is in the US, but there is a good deal of petty thievery—I am unfortunate to lose my little point-and-shoot camera to a pickpocket on my next to last day there—and there is certainly more breaking-and-entering.  Almost every dwelling or building we see of any size in any township or the central city is either secured by an armed guard or ringed by a fence and window bars, or all of the above.  (A front page ad on the weekend Top of the Times in the Cape Times features an ad for “burglar bars with style” guaranteed to provide “an almost impenetrable barrier against burglars, without your house looking—or feeling—like a prison!”)  Something to look forward to in the US if our growing gap between haves and have-nots continues to expand.

There is much agonizing in the newspapers about what to do to combat both the entrenched poverty and crime.  Too many young men have no work to keep them occupied and help them focus on a future.  To make matters worse, the economic downturn has meant the loss of many jobs and young people coming out of school with technical and professional degrees cannot find work.  While we are there, a national panel is engaged in a well-publicized series of discussions on The Next Economy focused on education, health care and crime that are not unlike similar problems in the US.  But in South Africa all of these are much worse.  Inequalities in the society are not improving and progress on all fronts is painfully slow.  People worry that their leaders don’t want to attack the hard issues and that there is no shared dream for the future.  (The Gini coefficient is a measure of inequality of income or wealth.  The US is high on that scale—about 50—but South Africa’s is one of the highest in the world—over 60.  Apartheid institutionalized that inequality and now the country is still struggling to fight its way out of that systematic disparity.  It could take a very long time.  Privileged classes don’t give up easily, even if doing so is the only real hope for their own security and future.)

One of the many discussions I have with working people in Cape Town is with a shop attendant early one morning while I’m getting coffee.  Her shop next door to the café is not yet open because her manager is nearly always late, despite the fact that he has a car and she has to take three buses for two hours to get to and from work.  She works a 12-hour day—in addition to the 4-hour commute–and leaves work at 9pm which makes the last leg of her journey home to the township where she lives a very dangerous one.  She runs a gauntlet of hooligans going to and from her home.  But she tells me she is luckier than most because her parents live with her and care for her young child while she is at work.

On the second evening, Amy and I (Amy is a new friend, a younger academic who has also taken some of the same chances I have with her professional career’s twists and turns) go to an Ethiopian restaurant where we have a memorable meal on a tabletop that is almost as monumental as Table Mountain.   The Ethiopian managers and servers are all from Ethiopia—they are tall, thin and regal in bearing.  One or two of the women resemble Nefertiti.

Afterwards, Amy and her driver—who will take her on to a visit to a friend on the East Cape—are generous to help me find Jill and other friends in another restaurant because one of them is leaving to go back home and I want to say goodbye to her.  The driver is, in turn, kind to actually track down this other restaurant and I run in to check that they’re there and then run back out again to pay the driver a bit for his time.  I hug Amy and wish her well for the visit with her friend.

The reason for all of these complications is that we also want our friend, Ketsy, who is leaving to go back home, to have a chance to go to St George’s Cathedral to walk the all-night Maundy Thursday candlelit labyrinth.  As is customary for Holy Week in so many parts of the world, the church’s members are on vigil for Holy Thursday and they make sure that the church and the labyrinth are safe throughout the entire night.  Ketsy had heard there was a labyrinth in the historic cathedral and wondered where it was; Jill and I had found it that afternoon while walking the town.

We help Ketsy’s driver find a parking space nearby and he heads on foot for a few minutes of listening to jazz in Greenmarket Square.  We walk through the cathedral and the labyrinth.  I finish the labyrinth first and look up to see crystal clear sky and stars.  (I don’t know that I’ve ever seen skies as clear as those we’ve enjoyed every day in Capetown.  It must have something to do with the dry winds that kick up and clear everything out a couple of times each day.)  The jazz in the background from the Square a block away makes the whole scene all the more full of grace.

The next day everyone I know is committed to some form of organized trip so I go out and walk on my own this time, intending to get to the cableway tram up Table Mountain and later to the District Six Museum.  The latter documents a particularly shameful chapter of the apartheid story, involving the removal and demolition of a historic township consisting of 60,000 households near the center city that was alive and well with people of all races and backgrounds living for many decades in harmony.  It was also the epicenter of South African culture, music and art.  When those artists were dispersed and their homes destroyed they took their talents to many different parts of the city and the country.  As devastating as that outcome was for those individuals, it may have contributed to the very rich stew of creative juices in Cape Town.  Although musicians and artists barely make a living here—just as everywhere else—there are countless performance spaces, music schools, workshops, and stages in homes and buildings throughout the city.

Like other societies we visit where the emphasis is on bringing people up from the bottom, many more people are employed in simple tasks.  One of these is in collecting fees for parking rather than having parking meters.  The addition of so many people on street detail also contributes to the security of people in the parks and on the sidewalks.  We’re told by people who live in the city that we will be even less of a target for crime if we don’t look like tourists.

But that would mean that we can’t look at maps and we wouldn’t be able to take photos.  I decide I’m just going to have to be a target since otherwise I won’t know where I’m going and I won’t be able to remember all of the stirring sights I’ve seen.  This voyage has been the first time I’ve tried to record in pictures where I’ve visited and I’ve found it really does help remind me when I write my notes up and send them home.

I wind up pretty much talking to people all day long.  I don’t get up the cableway tram because it is closed due to high winds.  Although I do find a taxi to take me to tour the district, I don’t get in to the museum because it is closed due to the Easter holiday.

Oh, well.  Time and time again, we find that the sights in South Africa are nothing compared to the people.  Robben Island and Table Mountain are just symbols for so much more.  If you get to them, fine.  If you don’t, fine.  Speak with the people instead.  You’ll be rewarded in spades.

Although India certainly sets one up for appreciating the obvious contrast with our next port of call, Mauritius is the clearest example I have ever experienced of the evident difference that intelligent, inspired leadership can make to a country.  True, it has great natural beauty and it has abundant water—the second the element you really begin to value as you travel through parched, densely populated countries, no matter how wondrous their historical sites.  But it is also almost immediately apparent that this island has a rich heritage of cultures and people who get along and go along.  If India is one large village, Mauritius is one large family.  Everyone seems to work for a family member.  French, African, Indian, Catholic, Muslim, Hindu—all live in a stew of participatory, parliamentary democracy and many generations of intermarriage, culture, and language.  In prototypical fashion, striking Creole women in Indian dress speak lyrical French while both the stirring native seggae (a mélange of the country’s own séga music and dance with reggae) and Western popular music play in the background.

Before we arrive at Port Louis, during the sail from India, I work with a hotel/tourism management student from Mauritius who had been flown to Kochin to join the ship.  We give a seminar pre-port about why French language, culture and influence have endured so strongly on the island, despite the fact that the British captured it from the French at the time of the Napoleonic wars over 150 years ago.  It’s a complicated story but suffice it to say that the British never really settled the island in any significant numbers and they specifically agreed to allow French language and culture to continue.  Thus, while the official language is English, most mass media is in French and the Franco (descended from French colonizers and sugar cane plantation owners) and Afro (descended from slaves imported to work in those sugar cane plantations) peoples speak a French Creole at home.  Mostly Hindus, Indians from previous labor migrations following the abolition of slavery now constitute a large percentage of the population (45%) and they speak many different dialects—as well as, of course, French and English.  Thus, the island’s many visitors from Europe—most of whom stay for weeks at a time—feel easily at home on Mauritius.  The Euro is almost as widely accepted for currency as Mauritian rupees.

The port and city downtown areas are bustling with commerce; they’re also alive with people, all of whom seem to know each other.  The boulevards feel almost European, despite the crush of traffic on all sides.  Statues in the parks are not to warriors or rulers but to scientists, artists, civic leaders and social workers.  Inscriptions on public art and monuments are in at least three languages.  The hard-pressed edge of frantic activity that we’ve experienced so vividly in Asian countries is gone.  The litter that has been a virtual carpet since leaving Japan is gone.  Real ceramic cups, tableware, silverware and stainless steel trays take the place of paper and plastics in the shops and restaurants, all of whom charge if you want paper or plastic for takeaway.  Since I want a good cup of coffee—I don’t care for the shipboard coffee to such an extent that I only try coffee when I get to ports—a real cuppa in a real cafe is the first thing I encounter off the water taxi from the ship.  It’s not only good, it’s marvelous.

Mauritius has a reputation for attracting very wealthy visitors to its stunningly beautiful beaches protected inside lagoons with coral reefs almost completely encircling the island.  But in our travel on the island—most of it in parts of the country much further out in the countryside than the usual tourist haunts—several friends and I see only fleeting glimpses of resort enclaves.  Mauritians don’t live on the sandy beaches but mostly in cooler mountain residences from which they commute to work in the urban and resort areas—they leave the beaches to the tourists.  Since the south and the mountains are also where we go, we experience Mauritians as a fully employed, friendly people of modest means with a genuine joie de vivre.  No one passes us without a greeting of “Bon jour” or “Bon soir.”  There are many school children and many local schools in each and every village.  Every child we see is in school, in dramatic contrast to India, where so many are on the streets.  We see absolutely no one homeless.  (In fact, many Mauritian homes and buildings take advantage of the coral quarries on the interior of the island to build small homes of very substantial, solid, rock and poured concrete.) Children walk to and from school, many with their parents, before and after work.  There is excellent bus service (on buses that use biogas from the sugar cane bagasse) to every nook and cranny of the island and the vast majority of the population makes its way daily to work by bus.  Health care is free, with clinics mandated to be available and no more than three kilometers in distance from every citizen.

Of course, an island presents a different set of challenges than many of the immense, far-flung republics we’ve visited, but Mauritius has also had to deal with a difficult past of slavery and colonialism as well as its melting pot of cultural diversity:  a multiethnic and multilingual population (they appear to address that by intermarrying and speaking at least three languages); a limited resource base (approached with education, health care, and measures encouraging population control—as well as attention to conservation and sustainable growth);  and global issues such as trade and climate change.  The Mauritius government is an international leader in initiatives for communications, responsible tourism, and global warming.

All is not sweetness and light.  Although commitment to social democracy is clear, there is lively debate among the many parties and shifting alliances in the parliamentary government. There is an environmental police force (Yes!) There are very strict corruption, crime and drug controls. In a diplomatic briefing, the US consul tells us that an American citizen has recently been tried for drug running on the island and is expected to get 30 years.  Hanging is still on the books.  The society has elements of male machismo in it that means the lot of women in the older, more traditional families can be difficult.  Women’s groups on the island are many in number and they are active in working for a wide range of domestic issues.

Sugar cane was at one time the only crop and major export.  Even today fields come right up to even the main roads.  But the island’s leaders have worked hard to diversify the economy:  textiles, Phoenix beer (a very good local beer), rum (a good local rum), and tea (a not so good Bois Chéri tea).  Mauritius is such a stable, thriving country—pretty much the most successful in all of Africa—that foreign investment is always knocking at the door.  The big concern among all parts of the society is that any capital be directed not only to profiteers but also to the benefit of Mauritians at all levels of the society.

The country is one of the most active and articulate advocates of ecotourism—not in the superficial “green” ways that so many corporations dabble in, but in the genuine sense of “responsible travel that conserves the environment and improves the welfare of local people.”  One of the most amazing documents is its Code of Conduct for Tourists which is worth quoting at length, translated from the French:

You are already most welcome in Mauritius.  You’ll be even more so if you will readily appreciate that our island . . .

• Considers its most important asset is its people.  They are well worth meeting and enjoying a friendly chat with;
• Possesses a rich capital of cultures, needs and values which it cherishes more than anything else;
• Is ready to give you value for money, but is not prepared to sell its soul for it;
• Has wealth of its own, which deserves to be preserved;
• Treats all its visitors like VIPs, but does not take kindly to those who overact the part;
• Is not all lagoon and languor, and boasts a host of many-splendored sights;
• Considers, without being prudish, that nude when flaunted can be provocative and offensive;
• Is not a faraway paradise of unlimited license;
• Takes pride in serving you with a smile and would be grateful for a smile in return;
• And will bare its soul willingly if you will handle it with care.

But enough with the general information—where do we go and what do we visit in paradise?

After much research and discussion on how to spend our paltry two days and one night in port (post-port evaluations hammer home the point that no one feels they have enough time to learn about this amazing, advanced society), a small group of six of us go to the southwest with the primary intent of hiking in a relatively new national park called the Black River Gorges.  Because two also want to snorkel, we find a couple of places to stay within easy reach of both park and beach.

Across from the public library in the little seaside village of La Gaulette, in a very affordable two-bedroom self catering apartment, Warner, Nancy and I enjoy the view from a wonderful back porch that looks out over the bay and across to the tiny Ile de Berthiers.  There is no sand beach but the proprietor also offers guide services to boat out to the lagoon enclosed by coral reefs for snorkeling and watching dolphins. Warner and Nancy go off on their own to snorkel our first afternoon.  I stay on the porch to read and get to hear bird song again.  Only then do I realize I heard no birds during our six days in India.  Cocks crow.  Dogs bark every once in a while.  I feel right at home because everyone on the block seems to be doing a bit of work on their houses.  One man is doing masonry work on a driveway; another is building a shed with a power saw; others run welding equipment to repair a gate; a father comes home from work and takes his pre-school son out to work in the garden.  There are fans going and we have the big apartment doors and windows wide open to the ocean breezes and there is mercifully no noise of air conditioning compressors.  We eat a wonderful meal at a highly recommended Chinese-Creole restaurant down the street. The beds are draped with mosquito netting but we don’t see or feel any mosquitoes despite the fact there are no screens.  We sleep very soundly.

Our three other friends—Amy, Richard and Mary—have been fortunate to reserve the last three places available in a mountain retreat, Lakaz Chamarel, a set of small villas with panoramic views of valleys and surrounded by gardens and birds.  We can barely pry them loose of the place to go hiking.  We finally do a good few hours of hiking and, of course, find another excellent place to sample the first-rate Mauritian cuisine—yet another stew and melting pot of flavors featuring particularly good seafood.  The day is as clear as a bell and from the highest point during our walks we can see all the way across the mountains of the park to the southern shores and ocean.

All six of us travel in one rented car, with convolutions required to accommodate four in the back seat.  Fortunately, we are all relatively small and lean.  We walk most of the time with short trips in the car except for the final trip back to the port and ship when we encounter an accident entering the city and debate whether four of us shouldn’t just try to walk the remaining 10 kilometers.  It is no laughing matter to be late for a ship because it will pull out on time.  (Actually, we do wind up joking that it would not be such a bad thing to be stranded for a few days in Mauritius and just catch up to the ship in Capetown.)    The accident is an overturned truck loaded with squid and prawns and we fear for the driver’s life when we finally see the accident scene.  Once past the knot of traffic, we make the final mad dash to the ship and arrive with one minute to spare. (I am leaving out what we go through to actually get there in the nick of time.)

Although there are highly original local writers in French, Mauritius doesn’t have any giants of world literature.  Its one romantic legend is a sappy tale of Victorian prudery—Paul et Virginie.  Its saddest, true, tragic tale involves a mass suicide of runaway slaves leaping to their deaths from one of the precipitous mountain cliffs in the remote south when they mistook the intentions of a group of approaching soldiers.  The party of soldiers from the capital was not coming to re-capture them but to tell them that slavery had been abolished and they were free.

In contrast, South Africa’s literature is deep, raw and wide with a rich, tragic history to draw from.  I must confess I didn’t have time to read any literature of resident Indian authors before or during our time there.  I am sure that that was a mistake.  On the other hand, I’ve long admired many Indian authors and have read a great many of their works—but perhaps most of those live in the West and grapple less directly with the large scale of problems at home.  South African literature struggles at a personal level with the societal issues of retribution and redistribution.  With so many of the disadvantaged damaged so brutally by the rule of privilege, greed and denial, everyone knows that someone must pay for the sins of the father.  Foreboding of one kind or another characterizes the several books I read by South African authors.  In a strange way, it is as though I were reading what I would feel and think if I were to live as a Westerner in India, where the conditions of everyday life for those outside privileged ranks are much like those of people in Africa.  The first book I read from a reviewed list I have of South African works—Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee—is hard to put down and impossible to forget.

When shipmates later discuss our far-too-short time in Mauritius, there is no disagreement:  We all agree with what Mark Twain had to say about the island when he visited:  “Mauritius was made first, and then Heaven, and that Heaven was copied after Mauritius.”  We would have liked much more than the two partial days we had time for. Like a bridge over waters—troubled and otherwise—this island goes a long way to help us make the transition from India to South Africa.  We have six days at sea to prepare for our arrival on the continent of Africa.